VLF-MSC: Vision-Language Feature-Based Multimodal Semantic Communication System

Gwang-Yeon Ahn, Jiwan Seo, Joonhyuk Kang

Keywords: Semantic Communication, Multimodal Wireless Transmission, Vision-Language Models, Next-Generation Wireless Networks

TL;DR: A unified semantic communication framework that transmits a vision-language feature for robust multimodal (image/text) wireless transmission.

Abstract: We propose Vision-Language Feature-based Multimodal Semantic Communication (VLF-MSC), a unified system that transmits a single compact vision-language representation to support both image and text generation at the receiver. Unlike existing semantic communication techniques that process each modality separately, VLF-MSC employs a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) to encode the source image into a vision-language semantic feature (VLF), which is transmitted over the wireless channel. At the receiver, a decoder-based language model and a diffusion-based image generator are both conditioned on the VLF to produce a descriptive text and a semantically aligned image. This unified representation eliminates the need for modality-specific streams or retransmissions, improving spectral efficiency and adaptability. By leveraging foundation models, the system achieves robustness to channel noise while preserving semantic fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that VLF-MSC outperforms text-only and image-only baselines, achieving higher semantic accuracy for both modalities under low SNR with significantly reduced bandwidth.

Submission Number: 21